Abstract
It is May 1960. Jim, an eager but somewhat anxious student, has an appointment with Mr Martin Wight, then Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE), and soon to become Dean of European Studies and Professor of History at the University of Sussex. Wight’s ‘Why is there no International Theory?’ has just been published.1 Together with ‘Western Values in International Relations’, which later appeared alongside the reprinted ‘Why’ essay in Diplomatic Investigations (1966),2 the article represents the fruit of at last four years of Wight’s research on the ‘international theory’ to be found in the intellectual history of the West. Jim is worried, however, that it seems to contradict some of Wight’s earlier arguments, in lectures that Jim heard at LSE, and, in the course of the conversation, inquires how Wight’s thought on international theory and the ‘society of states’ is evolving after his initial experiments, in those lectures, with the ‘three traditions’.3
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Notes
Martin Wight, ‘Why is there no International Theory?’, International Relations 2(1) (1960), pp. 261–281.
Martin Wight, ‘Western Values in International Relations’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), pp. 89–131.
These lectures were later reconstituted from the original notes and published as Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, edited by Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (London: Leicester University Press and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991).
Ian Hall, ‘History, Christianity and diplomacy: Sir Herbert Butterfield and international relations’, Review of International Studies 28(4) (2002), pp. 735–736.
Wight used this approach in his lectures, delivered at the LSE in 1959–1960, on Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant and Mazzini, edited by Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Wight cites Lovejoy in ‘Western Values in International Relations’, p. 91. See also Ian Hall, The International Thought of Martin Wight (New York: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 153–154.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964 [1936]), p. 5.
R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944).
Martin Wight, Power Politics, Looking Forward Pamphlet no. 8 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1946). An expanded edition, including chapters Wight had updated during the 1950s and 60s, was published posthumously: Power Politics, edited by Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (London: Leicester University Press and Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995 [1978]).
Ian Hall, ‘Martin Wight, western values, and the Whig tradition in international thought’, The International History Review 36(5) (2014) pp. 961–981.
See Martin Wight, ‘The balance of power’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations, pp. 149–175 and ‘The Balance of Power and International Order’, in Alan James (ed.), The Bases of International Order: Essays in Honour of C. A. W. Manning (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 85–115.
Martin Wight, Systems of States, edited by Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), pp. 153–173.
Harold J. Laski, An Introduction to Politics, revised edition by Martin Wight (London: Allen & Unwin, 1951).
See especially Martin Wight, ‘Christian Pacifism’, Theology 33(193) (1936), pp. 12–21.
There is a debate about how politically-engaged Wight was. Some think he disavowed all interest in practical politics (see, for example, Michael Nicholson, ‘The enigma of Martin Wight’, Review of International Studies, 7(1) (1981), pp. 15–22, and for a more positive view,
Robert Jackson, ‘Martin Wight, international theory and the good life’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 19(2) (1990), pp. 261–272), while others note his involvement in a number of causes (see Hall, ‘Martin Wight, western values, and the Whig tradition’).
On C. A. W. Manning’s international thought, see especially Hidemi Suganami, ‘C. A. W. Manning and the study of International Relations’, Review of International Studies 27(1) (2001), pp. 91–107, and on Wight’s views on this subject, see Hall, International Thought of Martin Wight, pp. 88–97.
Martin Wight, review of A. L. Rowse, The Uses of History and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, International Affairs 23(4) (1947), pp. 575–577.
Robert Jackson, among others, has argued there are close similarities between Wight’s thought on this subject, and that of his LSE colleague, the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. See especially Jackson’s The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and his Classical and Modern Thought on International Relations: From Anarchy to Cosmopolis (New York: Palgrave, 2005).
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Hall, I. (2016). International Theory Beyond the Three Traditions: A Student’s Conversation with Martin Wight (1913–1972). In: Lebow, R.N., Schouten, P., Suganami, H. (eds) The Return of the Theorists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137516459_33
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